As we head towards the latter part of Infinispan 5.3 series, we're doing a series of blog posts where we provide more detailed information of some of the key features in this release.

As part of Infinispan 5.3.0.Beta1, we added the ability to store data directly in Infinispan which previously would have required using a custom wrapper object, e.g. arrays. The way Infinispan supports storing these type of objects is by allowing a custom Equivalence
function to be configured for keys and/or values.

This is a less cumbersome method that enables object requiring custom equals/hashCode implementations to be stored without incurring on a extra cost per cache entry. We've already been using this internally to store Hot Rod, REST and Memcached data where keys and/or values can be byte arrays, and we've seen some nice improvements in terms of memory consumption.

A nice side effect of being able to store byte arrays natively is that it makes sharing data between multiple endpoints less cumbersome since you're now dealing with byte arrays directly instead of having to wrap/unwrap the byte arrays. More on this topic very shortly.